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| M. L. Arnold, 1936 | Claude Elliott, 1936 |
Special thanks to Kim Esiso, a Texas State graduate student, who was invaluable help in verifying names, titles, and readers; to former History Department Chair Gene Bourgeois who found the student wage money to hire Kim; and to Margaret Vaverek, librarian extraordinaire, who helped me untangle a number of theses which were misclassified in the Texas State Online Catalog.
Through 2006, the Department has produced 313 theses, about 8 percent of the 3,700 or so across the University. Two copies of each are located in Alkek Library--one in the stacks on level five, shelved alphabetically by author at AS36.T46, and one in Special Collections on level seven. The author's name is on the spine of each thesis, so specific pieces are very easy to find. One history thesis (Annie May Miller's, "The History of Kyle," 1950) is missing in the stacks, but is available on microfilm on level 3, AS36.T46 M54.
College and university students come and go, most leaving
nothing
but a jot on statistical enrollment summaries to mark their presence.
Some graduate students, on the other hand, leave a permanent legacy in
the form of a master's thesis, preserved in perpetuity in Alkek
Library, and sometimes in the departmental office or with the major
professor.
This body of literature can tell us something, not only about the student authors, but also about the faculty who supervised them and the society, institution, and department within which they did their work. The following is a preliminary attempt to put M.A. theses in History into some sort of a meaningful context.
The master's degree, like its bigger brother, the Ph.D., emerged in post-Civil War America as part of the research-oriented, German-inspired university system. The scientism of the late nineteenth century provided a fertile field for the growth of post-baccalaureate education and, nationally, graduate-school enrollments skyrocketed from about two hundred in 1870 to around fifty thousand in 1930.
Thus, the M.A. degree was commonplace by 1935 when the Board of Regents authorized the initiation of graduate education at SWT starting in the summer of 1936. The raison d'être, of course, was public school education. "The program of a fifth year of work being thus inaugurated is in response to a growing demand on the part of school authorities and of classroom teachers generally," explained the 1935-36 Catalog. The "market," if you will, was predominantly female. Down through World War II, roughly 70 percent of the graduate students at SWT were women, in stark contrast to the male majorities at the research universities.
Nevertheless, degree requirements conformed to what had become, and, broadly speaking, remains today, a largely standardized regimen of study: thirty hours of course work with a "B" average required, completion of a thesis demonstrating "the student's capacity for research and independent thought," and an oral final examination on course work and thesis.
The new program was built "around a major in Education . . .
in the
belief that certain types of professional training can best be done in
the atmosphere of a Teachers College campus." For reasons that are not
clear (maybe student preferences or internal politics), this was soon
altered to permit majors of 18 to 24 hours in several subject-matter
disciplines. Through the first two decades the bulk of the theses were
in Curriculum and Instruction, but a small, steady stream, also, came
out of the Departments of English, History, Modern Languages, Biology,
and Chemistry.
The popularity of the new program exceeded expectations. During the first four years, enrollment increased seven fold, from 25 students in 1936-37 to 177 in 1939-40, placing stress on an already overworked faculty who were attempting to cope with a 75 percent jump in undergraduates during the same years.
Something had to give and, predictably, it was the thesis requirement. Many faculty have always felt some ambivalence regarding the thesis. Thesis supervision is very time-consuming, especially with marginal students, and is normally undertaken as an overload. With a program viewed a terminal for public school teachers, it was easy to rationalize modification of the research component.
Thus, in 1939, candidates were authorized "with proper approval" to substitute a three-hour project "placing less emphasis upon research, e.g., an original critical essay, or philosophical treatise, or a report of a project, such as a remedial program in reading, or a comparative survey of a school system." This experiment was short-lived; only four such studies were produced by History between 1939 and 1941. They are shelved with the general thesis collection in Alkek Library in the AS36.T46's.
World War II decimated college and university enrollments around the country and SWT was no exception. By 1945, both the undergraduate and graduate student bodies had declined disastrously to only 35 percent of their 1940 highs, calling into question the very survival of the institution.
Since the thesis is the most formidable of the M.A. hurdles, it is, perhaps, not surprising that the requirement continued to be redefined. In 1941 the thesis was reduced to three hours of credit in the subject-matter departments, e.g., History 399, and had to be combined with a research methods course, Education 313. This experiment, too, was soon abandoned.
In 1944, a year in which only thirty-six students enrolled in the school's M.A. program, an option was provided to avoid the thesis altogether. In lieu of a thesis, a candidate could take six hours of Research Problems, for example History 381 and 382, courses requiring "independent research and the preparation of papers" written "in good literary style."
This change redefined, but obviously did not abandon, the traditional culminating writing experience. Over the next four years, forty-seven students, including six in history, produced sixty-six of these research papers. Some combined the two courses as one thesis-length essay; others opted for two shorter studies. One student did one paper in his major and one in his minor. Like theses, bound copies of these research papers are preserved in the Library on Level 6 in the LD5120.A79's. Interestingly, four future longtime SWT faculty members in Biology and Chemistry (Kay Davis, Thacher Gary, Bob Lowman, and Archie Parks) graduated from this program.
Confusion regarding the place and nature of the thesis in the master's program was not unique to SWT. Graduate faculties across the country wrestled with the same dilemma because the M.A. had evolved to serve two rather different purposes. On the one hand, it was intended as a preliminary credential for college teaching, a first step toward a Ph.D. for which specialization and a research component were essential. On the other, it was deemed a terminal degree for public school teachers where breadth of subject matter and pedagogy were of primary importance.
Thus, by the postwar era, master's-degree requirements, albeit within the framework of thirty or so hours, varied widely among and within institutions, a degree, in the words of one graduate dean, "a bit like a streetwalker--all things to all men (and at different prices)." In 1950, the Graduate Council at SWT permanently resolved the issue by authorizing two programs: a thirty-hour Master of Arts Degree requiring a thesis and a thirty-six hour Master of Education Degree with no thesis.
During these formative years, two historians, M. L. Arnold and Claude Elliott, were particularly influential in implementing and shaping the institution's new master's program. Marcus Llewellyn Arnold came to SWT in 1911 with a diploma from North Texas Normal, a B.A. from U.T., and several years of public school teaching experience.
Best remembered by his contemporaries for his "constant search for more learning," Arnold commuted to U.T. during the teens and twenties to complete a master's degree in 1920 and a Ph.D. in 1927. At that time, he was one of only three Ph.D.'s on the SWT faculty. He was a member of the original Graduate Council, a committee of seven faculty, which planned the new graduate program in 1935, and remained a member for the next two years during initial implementation. He supervised fourteen of the twenty-eight history theses written between 1938 and 1942, when, at age seventy, he was forced to retire in accordance with State policy.
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| M. L. Arnold, 1936 | Claude Elliott, 1936 |
Claude Elliott, a native of the small town of Cross Plains in West Texas, earned teaching credentials at West Texas State Teachers College and taught briefly before coming to San Marcos to complete his bachelor's degree in 1923. For the next five years he was superintendent of schools at La Feria, near Harlingen in the Rio Grande Valley, while he pursued his M.A. degree at UT. He married Emma Edwin Moore of San Marcos in 1927 and returned to SWT as an instructor in the fall of 1929. He taught part-time during the early 30s while he worked in Austin on his Ph.D., which was awarded in 1934.
Elliott was a very productive scholar, which was unusual in the teachers' college environment, and he had administrative aspirations. In 1939 he replaced Arnold on the Graduate Council, and in 1943 he became Executive Secretary of that Council, that is, chief administrator of graduate school business. In the meantime, he was appointed Registrar, and, in 1946, assumed the additional part-time duties as the school's initial Dean of Graduate Studies, ultimately a full-time position which he held until his death in 1958.
Despite his administrative duties and scholarship, Elliott supervised thirty of the sixty-two history theses written between 1938 and 1957 and all six of the research papers produced in lieu of theses between 1944 and 1948. In addition, as Graduate Dean, he authored in 1955 the original edition of the "Manual of Directions for Preparing the Thesis or Research Problem," establishing a standard format for graduate essays which has not changed substantially in the last half century.
Arnold and Elliott had very similar backgrounds--undergraduate work at teachers colleges, public school teaching experience, advanced degrees from UT, and scholarly specialties in Texas and American Civil-War era topics. It is likely that Arnold, twenty-five years the elder, was one of Elliott's professors at SWT; it is certain that Arnold, as Chair, was largely responsible for Elliott's initial employment and rapid rise to professor in 1938. Whether Arnold was truly Elliott's mentor is not known, although the fact that Elliott was one of the pallbearers at Arnold's funeral in 1952 suggests a close relationship.
Be that as it may, the two historians played a key role in the early development of the graduate program at SWT and, for all practical purposes, they were the graduate program in History, together directing over 70 percent of the theses prior to 1958. They collaborated as first and second readers on no less than thirteen.
Theses usually develop out of course work. When the new program was launched in 1936, there were no graduate courses in History. The degree, however, required that of the twenty-four non-thesis hours, only six had to be in graduate-level courses; thus, the bulk of early candidates' work was undergraduate, mostly in courses open only to seniors.
The Department immediately put in two senior-level courses, one in twentieth-century European and the other in recent American. In 1938, the first graduate courses were added to the Catalog: History 313, Problems in European History, and 317, Problems in American History. These four courses would remain the standard offerings for more than a decade.
Despite the parity between American and European implied by the curriculum, the vast majority of the students wrote their master's essays on local or United States national history. This can be explained only in part to the influence of Arnold and Elliott. Library holdings, language barrier, public school curriculum, and, of course, student predilections were, doubtless, important factors.
Through World War II, nineteen studies were on Texas topics,
mostly
town or county histories, sixteen were in post-National-Period
American, and only two were in European. A small subset of three theses
were pedagogical, laying out an historical unit for presentation in a
public school classroom. These overlapped a larger body of similar
studies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, usually
supervised by E.O. Wiley.
After World War II,